Though Argard isn’t a household name like Nokia or Jabra, its new M10 Bluetooth headset just might make them one. This shiny coin-shaped earpiece fits snugly into your ear and uses an external receiver for connectivity. It also only weighs 5-grams, has 3 hours of talk-time, over 100 of standby, and comes with multiple rubber ear inserts to ensure it fits comfortably and tight. Seems to be a pretty sweet headset that’ll keep you from looking like a douche. No details on price or availability have been set, so you’re just going to have to keep wishing harder and harder. Argard M10 Headset [Electronista] → Read More
If I had this commercial growing up I probably would have drank more milk. Hell just watching this makes me want a glass. Milk Gooood [Tokyo Mango] → Read More
Teclast has introduced a new touch-screen MP3 player that’s a smidge smaller than a credit card. Of course, we won’t be seeing one in the States, but hey at least we can dream and drool in the meantime. The C260 features a plethora of goods but unfortunately nothing new or ground-breaking. So this sucka’ has a 260,000 color TFT 2.4-inch QVGA LCD touchscreen, does the amount of colors it displays play into the model number? If it does, I’ve gotta say that’s pretty lame. Battery life seems to be good at 12 hours but this may vary depending on how much video you play. It also has an FM radio with 20 presets and recording functionality which seems to be a standard these days. Transfer your data via USB 2.0 and microSD card slot. What the crap is ‘learning function’? You got me but it has that too. Games, photos, e-books and all that jazz are included as well. If you’re in China or know someone who is you can get one for a mere $50 give or take. Touch Me [Teclast] → Read More
Good news for those of you are beyond sick of Motorola’s crappy OS: Moto’s A910 won’t come with it. The FCC approved Motorola’s new Linux-based A910 cellphone for use on GSM networks. Features you ask? Oh there are plenty of them. The A910 comes packed with GPRS and UMA for connecting over WLAN networks, a new Linux-Java based platform, 1.3-megapixel camera with external display and photo lighting, video capability, streaming video, MP3 player, a TransFlash card slot for extra storage, Bluetooth, and more. Basically, we know you’re drooling over both the features and design. So are we. Expect it to come out soon though now that the FCC has approved it. Pricing should be moderate but not overly expensive Official Site → Read More
It looks like some people using Google Notebook are bookmarking sensitive personal information, including social security numbers and email passwords. And others are finding that sensitive information via the Google Notebook search tool. This all played out in the comments to this Digg post. What’s amazing is that Google Notebook defaults to privacy, and users have to explicitly opt in to have information made available via the search. Google probably has no responsibility for this information, although some of it appears to be third party personal information, and they are hosting it on their servers. We’ll see if they start to censor this stuff to avoid liability. Our previous coverage of Google Notebook is here and here. Update: Yep, it looks like Google is starting to take down some of the sensitive content linked from that Digg post: → Read More
Just a heads up that Dyne is releasing the Tuny 9 and Tuny 11 in Korea and both look sexy as hell! You can pick them up in 512MB (why even bother with this size anymore), 1GB, and 2GB versions. The Tuny rocks a 2-inch 176×220 pixel display and is only half an inch thick. You also get 18 hours of battery life, TV out, Bluetooth, FM radio, and support for multiple codecs. Pretty sweet right? The Tuny 11 is a bit trimmed down and only has a 1.7-inch screen and no Bluetooth or TV out. What a shame. They both look incredibly well designed though and I’d buy one in addition to my iPods. Hopefully someone gets smart and starts importing these from Korea soon. No word on pricing. → Read More
Microsoft has all the cash in the world and you’re telling me they couldn’t hire a better guy in PR and Advertisement? Whatevs Microsoft. Your Windows 95 commercial is seriously lacking some hot 1990s-esque footage. → Read More
Ever been on a really long airplane flight and your battery gives out about 3/4 of the way through your Seinfeld: Season 5 DVD? No longer will you miss George trying to get that Frogger machine across the street thanks to Samsung. Samsung has released details about their new Sense Q35 laptop (pictured with gianormous battery). They say it will be powered by a really ugly fuel cell battery that can get around eight hours of juice. Eight hours is wonderful and worth the extra weight and all, but when it explodes, expect mushroom clouds of maximum proportions. Samsung Fuel Cell to Power Laptop for 8 Hours a Pop → Read More
Shabbat shalom my fellow Jewish CrunchGear readers! Since there are so many Xmas posts asking what you got and wishing you a happy holiday, I figured I’d do one for us Jews (I converted, hence the Italian last name). I hope you all had eight great nights of hanukkah and enjoyed the pounds of gelt you got! So my fellow Jewish readers, what did you receive or give for Hanukkah? I gave my best friend an iPod Shuffle with some cases. You? → Read More
Tools to convert file types, particularly audio and video files, are among the last to move from the desktop to the browser. Part of the problem is CPU usage during the conversion (it’s expensive to do this online) and part of the problem is the upload time for the user. We’ve written about a couple of products that do online file conversion, Zamzar and Media Convert. But Marseille, France based Hey!Watch, which we tested our yesterday evening, appears to be a much more robust product than anything we’ve seen previously, and they’ve added developer tools to help build their functionality directly into other web services. The service is in private beta, but there is some information on the home page and you can request an invitation to join. Hey!Watch allows users to import files to the service in a number of ways, including uploading from a hard drive or simply putting in the URL of a video froa YouTube or other popular online video service. But they also allow users to upload videos via a RSS feed, so new enclosures from future show will automatically be uploaded as well. The company has also created bookmarklets and a Firefox plugin to import a video from a currently viewed website to the service with a single click. Once files are uploaded, they can be converted to all of the usual formats and then downloaded. And they’ve also used RSS intelligently here as well – they’ve created a RSS feed for all of a user’s converted files, so they can simply be gathered from a feed reader without going back to the Hey!Watch site each time. There’s a use case for this that is really compelling – any time you see a video on YouTube or another site that you want to keep, all you have to do is hit the button on the bookmarklet, and later gather the file from the RSS feed. Those files can be in MPEG4 format for an iPod, or DVD format for burning to a DVD. Want to create a DVD for a friend of your favorite YouTube music videos? This service is going to make that dead simple. And the fun doesn’t stop there. All of the key functionality is available via a REST API, for developers to build directly into their products. Hey!Watch will have a free version, along with a premium version with higher → Read More
Python XM Bianco Laptop Bag Looks Good, Can Play Rough Trading PS3s for Wiis: What All the Kids are Doing The Most Beautiful Women Bloggers in the Whole Wide World Ever What Did You Get for Christmas? Reader Response: Holiday SPECTACULAR Days 01/02 → Read More
TailRank and competitor Megite are fighting for second place behind blog news leader, TechMeme. It’s not surprising that both companies are expanding into ranking popular videos, too. But it’s surprising that both companies launched their products on the same day. We covered Megite earlier, and then received an email from TailRank founder Kevin Burton that they have just launched their product as well. The basic idea is the same – TailRank is analyzing videos that blogs link to and embed on their sites, and then determine what videos are popular based on the aggregate weighted statistics. Bigger blogs get more weight, but smaller blogs get a vote, too. Competition is a great thing, and these companies are competing hard. Megite even recently took a swipe at TailRank based on recent Alexa stats, here. As to video, which product is better? Well, they look about the same, although I give a slight nudge to Megite based on on the interface, which shows more videos on a page. → Read More
News At Seven is a brilliant piece of technology. The problem is that it is a useless product in its current form. And they used tax dollars to create it. In an entirely automated process, News At Seven gathers news items from around the web and presents a newscast from an avatar: News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news–augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention. The end result is a newscast, with an avatar, and a computerized voice. The headline seems to be fairly relevant, and I’m interested in understanding how they determine the most newsworthy items of the day. I’d say this would be useful for blind people, but the images and video is an integral part of the product. In its current form, it’s nice to look at once, but it is not an efficient way to consume news, for any demographic. Actually, perhaps SecondLife’rs would be into this. The project was created by Northwestern University’s InfoLab and was apparently funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant no. 0535231). I can’t find any information on the NSF site about this particular grant, but I would be very interested to know how many tax dollars funded this. Forgetting the interface, there may be some interesting uses of the technology that gathers and contextualizes the news bits. I’ve included a quick poll to see what readers think. I think News At Seven is: Lame, but the underlying tech is cool 39343% of all votes A waste of tax dollars 26829% of all votes A beautiful piece of technology 25027% of all votes Total Votes: 911 Started: December 27, 2006 Update: The grant information is here. News At Seven has received $268,112 so far from the NSF. → Read More
Megite, a blog aggregation news service (see here for a comparison of Megite to its competitors) has launched a videos vertical that tracks popular videos in an interesting way. Unlike the Digg video channel, which ranks videos based solely on user voting, Megite’s ranking is based on what vidoes blogs are linking to or embedding into their sites (the same way Megite tracks other news). An authoritative blog linking to a video can drive it up in the rankings, as will a large number of less authoritative blogs. The “freshness” of the video is also important (meaning Megite is tracking newly uploaded videos). Megite is tracking 20 video sites, although understandably YouTube is currently dominating the results. This is a good way to rank videos because it suffers from less potential voting fraud than, say, Digg. If an established blog links to a video there’s a very good chance it is a real vote for that video. Taking aggregate statistics from tens of thousands of blogs will tend to yield very good results. More from Rex Dixon, who also links to an interview he recently conducted with Megite founder Matthew Chen. → Read More
So I totally intended to post an ifrogz winner yesterday, but it just didn’t happen. Bit too much Maker’s and too many distractions. In fact, I’m still hung over. I’ve been gorging myself on leftovers all day hoping to make myself feel better, but it seems to be having the opposite effect so far. That does, however, mean that today I owe you two winners. The comments from yesterday were a bit sparse, mainly because we had so few posts, but I managed to extrapolate (is it just me or does that word sound obscene?) a winner from the bunch. → Read More
The massive success of Jingle’s 800-Free-411 service, which allows people to get 411 information without the outrageous fees charged by cell phone carriers and other telephone companies (up to $3.50 per call), has finally caught the attention of at least one of the big guys. AT&T acquired InFreeDA, a competitor to Jingle and operator of the 800-411-Metro service, for an undisclosed amount, and announced a free 411 service. Jingle’s success has been significant. They have raised over $60 million and have quickly taken 3% of the U.S. 411 market. Jingle has taken over 100 million 411 calls to date. We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October – listen to it here. Our previous coverage on TechCrunch is here. AT&T’s service, which will be available at 800-Yellowpages, looks to be very similar, although it is currently available only in Bakersfield, CA, Oklahoma City, OK, and Columbus, OH. Instead of the one advertisement that Jingle plays, however, AT&T will be playing up to four ads, from 5-10 seconds each. That’s asking a lot of their customers (up to 40 seconds of ads before the information is given), but AT&T may be able to compete based on quality of information, something that Jingle has been criticized for in the past. The main product page for 800-Yellowpages is here, and the FAQs are here. → Read More
Behold one of the coolest laptop backpacks we’ve seen in awhile: The Python XM Bianco form Booqbags. Although extremely pricey at $179.99, this bag has tons of pockets, holders, and can protect your laptop in extreme conditions. The website says it can hold a Macbook, 15-inch Powerbook, 17-inch Powerbook, Macbook Pro, and a 17-inch Macbook Pro.We’re pretty sure it’ll hold other non-Apple laptops of the same dimensions as well. The Python is also made out of ultra-durable materials and has a basllistic nylon exterior with a stunning dark brown interior. Python also claims you can can use the bag for hundreds of other uses. Sounds good to me. It even comes with a 5-year warranty. Better act fast if you like what you see though. Only 250 are available and they’re going to go fast. → Read More
You could call it an invasion of privacy or you could call it hours of drunken fun. Either way, apparently you can tune into some of NYC’s traffic cameras to view what’s going on around town mdash; and by town I mean Manhattan. Only 10 cameras will stream in real time but there’s still an additional 35 cameras that do stills. Worth checking out if you’re a terrorist, pervert, sight-seer, or Internet user. Traffic Cams NYC [via Digg] → Read More
Now this is a sweet looking PS3! Michal Birecki’s dad owns a body shop. So aside from being a loan shark, he can also paint cars and objects beautifully and with exquisite detail. This white, glossy PS3 took over 14 hours to professionally complete and is going for over $1000. Don’t expect help from Sony though when it breaks though mdash; the case was tampered with so the warranty. If you so desire this white PS3, you can check out the auction here. Dreaming of a White Christmas [Kotaku] → Read More
No lie. One time my cat was playing around with my iPod and when I picked it up, it had a funky debug-looking menu screen on it. I flipped out and thought that my new iPod 5G was totally busted. Well I eventually got it back to its normal mode, but what I didn’t know is that there was a diagnostic menu for testing purposes. In case you want to skip the video, hold the middle button down whilst holding the up button to reset the iPod. Then when it resets, hold the button left button and it’ll boot into diagnostic mode. This can tell you all sorts of wicked information about your iPod’s internal guts, let you ren utests, and totally freak people out. If you want to get out of it, just manually reset it again by holding the middle buttown and the top button. [via Digg] → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
